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Alex Alexiev is chairman of the Center for Balkan and Black Sea Studies and the editor of the geopolitical website bulgariaanalytica.org. He tweets on national security at twitter.com/alexieff and could be reached at alexievalex4@gmail.com.

The article first published in americanthinker.com on 03/18/2019. Reading the “Manifesto” of the Christchurch mass-murderer, the first thing that strikes the reader is just how rational he about what he expects will await him after his ghastly deed. He hoped to survive, serve a life sentence and be released after 27 years, all the while using his time in jail to “spread his ideals by media coverage.” Not unreasonably, he might have also said that he would write a best seller and become rich while in jail. All of this thanks to the fact that the death penalty in New Zealand (and all of Europe) is considered cruel and unusual punishment even for scum like this. More to the point, the entire mainstream media in both America and Europe promptly

About Alex Alexiev

Alex Alexiev is chairman of the Center for Balkan and Black Sea Studies and the editor of the geopolitical website bulgariaanalytica.org. He tweets on national security at twitter.com/alexieff and could be reached at alexievalex4@gmail.com.

A while ago the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, opined publicly that Muslims were completely innocent of the sins of colonialism and gave the example of Al-Andalus, (Andalusia) as an example of the allegedly peaceful and equitable coexistence of the three great religions – Christianity, Judaism and Islam, under Muslim domination. This is, of course, a long standing Muslim propaganda belied by the simple historical fact that both Christians and Jews in Spain under Muslim rule had to pay the infidel tax jizya as a mandatory indication of their subservient status. For people in the Balkans, it is not necessary to go all the way to Spain to find out that Al-Tayeb’s insinuations are nothing but a bold-faced lie. We have the well-documented and centuries-old experience of

About Alex Alexiev

Alex Alexiev is chairman of the Center for Balkan and Black Sea Studies and the editor of the geopolitical website bulgariaanalytica.org. He tweets on national security at twitter.com/alexieff and could be reached at alexievalex4@gmail.com.

The article first published in americanthinker.com on 02/27/2019. As The World Bank was founded at Bretton Woods in 1944, WWII was still on, though its ultimate outcome was no longer in doubt. From the beginning its charter was to alleviate poverty through loans and expert advice. More recently, it pledged to help end extreme poverty by 2030. Toward this purpose it distributed some $60 billion in loans (2015) to countries that, for the most part, had difficulties accessing market loans. It was not always successful in what was or should have been a noble pursuit. It gave money to countries like China that no longer needed it and to dictators that pilfered it. Through it all, it was perennially unable to prove how much good it was doing or develop reliable

About Alex Alexiev

Alex Alexiev is chairman of the Center for Balkan and Black Sea Studies and the editor of the geopolitical website bulgariaanalytica.org. He tweets on national security at twitter.com/alexieff and could be reached at alexievalex4@gmail.com.

About Alex Alexiev

Alex Alexiev is chairman of the Center for Balkan and Black Sea Studies and the editor of the geopolitical website bulgariaanalytica.org. He tweets on national security at twitter.com/alexieff and could be reached at alexievalex4@gmail.com.

The article first published in americanthinker.com on 02/04/2019. As I started writing this on the balmy if increasingly socialist, left coast on January 27th, the US media were full of dire predictions of a catastrophic cold snap in the Midwest and New England. The same day, in Brussels, 70,000 people (35,000 of them clueless school children) demonstrated with slogans like “Winter is not coming anymore,” “Nature grows, capitalism blows” and “Stop denying the earth is dying.” Alas, Winter did come to both the Midwest and Europe and did so with a vengeance. 21 people have died of hypothermia in the US so far and at least 10 in Poland. Temperatures dipped to a hellish minus 23 degrees Fahrenheit (- 30.5 Celsius) in Chicago, and minus 14 degrees Celsius ( 7

About Alex Alexiev

Alex Alexiev is chairman of the Center for Balkan and Black Sea Studies and the editor of the geopolitical website bulgariaanalytica.org. He tweets on national security at twitter.com/alexieff and could be reached at alexievalex4@gmail.com.

The article first published in americanthinker.com on 01/20/2019. To understand what’s going on in the UK after the defeat of Theresa May in Commons one needs some background not only on what motivated the Brits to vote to leave the European Union, but more importantly what was it about the EU that they particularly disliked. The first part of it is easy. The English, and it was they who provided the bulk of the ‘leave’ votes, were simply tired of being told what to do by a European Commission that had not been elected by them or anybody else, for that matter. It was a simple matter of sovereignty, especially after the European Commission turned out to be nothing more than a proxy for a new German diktat after Merkel without

About Alex Alexiev

Alex Alexiev is chairman of the Center for Balkan and Black Sea Studies and the editor of the geopolitical website bulgariaanalytica.org. He tweets on national security at twitter.com/alexieff and could be reached at alexievalex4@gmail.com.

The article first published in americanthinker.com on 01/15/2019. For many years geopolitical pundits have debated which way China is likely to go after it pulls large numbers of its population out of poverty. Following the semi-market reforms undertaken by Deng Xiaoping in 1978 and large-scale development, China has indeed brought large numbers of its population- some 250 million at last count – into the middle class. One theory, named after Reagan diplomat, Jeane Kirkpatrick, holds that dictatorships, like Franco’s in Spain and Salazar’s in Portugal, easily transform into democracies once their citizens become well-to-do and are no longer satisfied with economic freedoms alone. Others have argued that this does not apply to communist systems that operate on different command principles altogether. This debate has become even more heated given some

About Alex Alexiev

Alex Alexiev is chairman of the Center for Balkan and Black Sea Studies and the editor of the geopolitical website bulgariaanalytica.org. He tweets on national security at twitter.com/alexieff and could be reached at alexievalex4@gmail.com.

Most of the languages spoken around the world come from someplace else and nobody seems to mind that. English is spoken by many millions in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand etc., but there has yet been no effort to declare that language American, Canadian, Australian etc. Even the Irish, who have a good reason to be unhappy about the way they were treated by the English historically, have no problem acknowledging that the language they speak is English. It’s the same in Latin America, where the language they use is neither Argentinian nor Colombian or Venezuelan, but what the conquistadores, rapacious as they were, brought with them. There is also a small prosperous country in Europe called Switzerland that has done very well for itself for centuries recognizing

About Alex Alexiev

Alex Alexiev is chairman of the Center for Balkan and Black Sea Studies and the editor of the geopolitical website bulgariaanalytica.org. He tweets on national security at twitter.com/alexieff and could be reached at alexievalex4@gmail.com.

The article first published in americanthinker.com on 12/16/2018. It is tempting to dismiss the just ended environmental circus at Katowice as just another demonstration of Charles Mackay’s ‘madness of crowds,’ symptom but this would mean missing its intensely political nature as a frontal assault on capitalism and the last great hope of the Left to do away with the hated free market. COP-24, as the Katowice cabal is known, was but the 24th iteration of the United Nations Climate Change Conference that was originally dedicated to fighting global warming until the name became inconvenient when temperatures refused to cooperate with the mantra. It is already clear that COP-24, like most of the previous confabs, will do nothing more than punt fighting the promised doom of us all to a future date.

About Alex Alexiev

Alex Alexiev is chairman of the Center for Balkan and Black Sea Studies and the editor of the geopolitical website bulgariaanalytica.org. He tweets on national security at twitter.com/alexieff and could be reached at alexievalex4@gmail.com.

The article first published in instituteforenergyresearch.org on 12/14/2018. On Oct. 17, 2018, Poland’s largest energy company PGNiG signed a contract with two American LNG companies to deliver up to 1 million tons of gas each over the next 20 years. It is the first large U.S. LNG contract in Eastern Europe, and it won’t be the last. Indeed, it is very likely that American LNG companies will become major suppliers to Eastern Europe in the near future. There are a number of reasons for this, both politically and economically. It is, of course, well-known that oil and gas exports, and particularly the latter, have long been used by Russian rulers as political weapons to achieve specific policy objectives—more often than not directed against Western interests. So none of this

About Alex Alexiev

Alex Alexiev is chairman of the Center for Balkan and Black Sea Studies and the editor of the geopolitical website bulgariaanalytica.org. He tweets on national security at twitter.com/alexieff and could be reached at alexievalex4@gmail.com.

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